Ears Wide Open: Brightener

Kevin Bronson on April 13th, 2016

1

Typically, we’d start an item like this nice and biographical: Brightener is the musical vehicle for singer-songwriter-producer Will Sturgeon, etc., etc., etc. But we interrupt that broadcast for … Holy crap, Will Sturgeon is from Palm Desert and his band Brightener just got added to the Coachella lineup and they’re gonna play at noon Saturday and that must be better than air conditioning in August, right?

“I was really really excited, my hands were shaking,” Sturgeon told his hometown Desert Sun newspaper of receiving the 11th-hour call from Gopi Sangha of Goldenvoice asking if Brightener would play. “Growing up in the desert, and attending the best festival in the world (in my backyard) for the past eight or so years, and being a songwriter… playing Coachella is the closest thing I have to a dream come true.”

Anyway, more background: Brightener debuted with an EP in 2013 and last fall released the full-length “Hummingbird,” made after Sturgeon — once a principal in the Miracals (they were called the Smiles before a legal dust-up) — relocated back to the Coachella Valley in 2014. That album focused largely on acoustic-based folk-pop, but the new Brightener single “When the Lights Go Up” adds some sparkle to the mix. It’s a buoyant psych-pop tune about anticipation, Sturgeon says. “I met a girl on vacation in my town and we hit it off,” he explains. “She went back home to the other side of the country, and we stayed in touch for a month before deciding to fly and meet up with each other in the middle of the country for a weekend.” It is, to use a fan’s description of Sturgeon’s music (and how he derived his music moniker), “a day brightener.”

Brightener’s new single (b/w “Haven’t You Noticed”) is out today via New Professor Music.

||| Stream: “When the Lights Come Up”